


Heart Missing

by theloverneverleaves



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 17:13:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2317082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theloverneverleaves/pseuds/theloverneverleaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah Manning packs her bags and leaves his life without a trace, as if she'd never even been there. But she leaves with more than just her things, and unlike an old jumper, a heart can't be returned quite so easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart Missing

The house still smells like her.

It’s not obvious, not to everyone else, because hell, there is no one else like Cal, not for miles and miles and miles. But to him, it’s like a sucker punch the second he unlocks the door of his tiny, crappy little apartment in the city. He’d never liked the place much, but it had been good for work, good for having a real life among other people. (He always liked the cabin better, but she’s all over that too, in the smell of the sofa cushions and the crumples of the bed sheets, in the mug he can’t quite get clean after she stained it with her three day old coffee as a thick as tar. She’s in that sweater she never stopped wearing the whole time she was there. He almost wished she’d taken it with her too.) But a real life isn’t what he wants anymore. Not after everything. Not after the massive screw over that was his last work project.

After all, the company had given him enough money to do whatever the hell he wanted, even if it felt like blood money.

By the end of the day, there’s a single duffel bag by the door as the lights are switched off, the house secured and he’s gone before the sun touches the horizon. He would take his truck back out to the cabin, but that’s gone too, so instead the tiny little borrowed sedan carries him home. It feels more like home than the apartment anyway. He’d made a hundred promises lately. Borrowing the car, going to the cabin, doing all that just until he sorted things out. Just until he worked out what happened.

(He can’t say she stole from him, robbed him blind. He won’t say it, despite the ten grand hole in his bank accounts and the absence of the truck he’d been attached to for longer than was strictly healthy. She wouldn’t steal from him, something whispers in his mind. She’s coming back. She’s coming back. She’ll come back.)

Once he reaches the cabin, it’s dark, but he doesn’t need lights to find his way inside. It still feels like her, and her ghost still guides him home. Part of him expects to find her in the bed upstairs, hair spread across the bedsheets like wings, and that spark in her eyes as she woke up to welcome him back. She’d have him in bed in less than an hour.

But that was then. When he still had a job, when she wasn’t a hole he didn’t quite know how to fill, when he wasn’t trying to work out how to patch up the mess she’d left behind.

His mother had warned him once, about falling in love too easily. He’d known Sarah Manning for barely a month, and her absence was killing him more than the theft. He’d always known he’d cared about her, known that she was special but this…

So this is love.

There’s a bitter note to the thought. Small wonder, all things considered.

 

 

 

 

Once upon a time there was a dragon and a princess. She was bold and brave and didn’t need a knight, and the dragon was kind and good hearted, and would no sooner kidnap someone as bite off his own tail. So when the princess came to the dragon’s castle, she did so of her own free will. And there she remained for many weeks. But the princess was wild and free, and as thoughts of her future began to loom, she ran, for fear of what may happen if she stayed.

The dragon was heartbroken. And though many others came to try and win his affection, none succeeded, for a dragon’s heart, once given away, could never be recovered.

(His mother’s stories were always different when he was growing up, but these days, that’s the only version of the story he can hear.)

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, when he’s asleep at night, he thinks he can feel her. It’s nothing concrete, nothing solid, just a feeling. The feeling of having her near, of knowing she was safe and well and happy. He doesn’t know if it’s ridiculous that that still makes him feel so much better, to know she’s okay. It’s been six months, two weeks, and four days. It shouldn’t matter to him anymore.

  
(It does. It always will.)

He quit his job, sold his flat, and now his life is that tiny little cabin in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but miles and miles of forest for company and his own thoughts. It’s nice. Nicer than he could imagine. He buys a wood burner, keeps a stock of logs for the fire that he burns most of the year more because he likes the open flames than because he needs the heat. He builds a chicken coop in the summer, and by fall there are some hens filling the space. He knows you’re not supposed to name them, but he can’t help it. (After all, Maggie, Wilma and Euridice are the closest things to friends he’s got by now.) He learns to cook with the eggs. Mostly it starts out as scrambled eggs and fried eggs for breakfast, but suddenly he’s making quiches and cakes and he’s taking the extras in the small town nearby because there’s literally too much food for one bachelor to consume alone. He buys a camera, starts taking pictures of the seasons around the house. He’s out in the forest a lot too. He’s had the cabin for years, but never really known it like this. It was inherited from an uncle, just a summer house on the side. Now that it’s all he has, he takes the time to appreciate it. Within six months he reckons he knows more about the surrounding area than anyone else. There are old farmyards, creeks and trees as tall as buildings.

It’s quiet, but he likes it. No one can screw him over out here. His stake in the optics for the robots gave him enough to keep going, and now that he’s more or less opened a farm shop he manages to keep things going. Keeps food on the table, keeps heat in the house and the electricity bills paid.

Maybe occasionally he dips into old vices, crawling around Darknet, occasionally getting paid for rather more questionable projects. But nothing majorly illegal. It’s a line he won’t cross. He doesn’t mind sticking his toes in the water, but full on corporate fraud isn’t his scene anymore. Last thing he wants is the FBI on his doorstep. Either way, he gets paid. Life goes on.

It goes on without her, but it goes on.

There are nights when her absence feels fresh again, when it’s like it all happened yesterday and it all hits him like a sledgehammer. He can’t explain it (he doesn’t think he wants to) but those nights are the hardest. Those are the nights were he dusts down the beat up old acoustic guitar his father gave him when he was fourteen and just plays and plays and plays until it all bleeds away like the red sores that burn into his fingertips. He doesn’t play regularly enough for them to harden very much. He doesn’t mind.

Most of all, he flies. He flies and flies and flies until he’s seen every inch of the world, until he’s found the life he probably should have had years ago. He wonders if things would be different, if she’d met him now. He’s different now. More settled, quieter, more at peace and far less bitter at the world and at what he was doing in it. Maybe he can’t save all the bees, but he can save the ones nearby. (He plants a garden of sunflowers and bluebells, forget-me-nots and rosemary, white clover and honeysuckle. It’s a silly project, and the climate’s all wrong, but it works. There are always bees around in the summer.)

No matter how hard he tries, though, he can’t go back. He can’t stop us becoming I. He wonders if he could have done something differently, if he could have made her stay, if he pushed her away. And when the winter dies, a year after she’s gone, it sinks in that she’s not coming back.

It takes well over a year for him to even accept that it was all just a con to her. And that hurts worst of all. Because he gave her so much, and no matter what he wishes, he can’t take it back. He can’t take any of it back.

He finds something called a Princess Flower almost two years after she’s gone. He buys it and plants it in the little flower garden. It reminds him of her.

The flower, at least, will stay.

 

 

 

 

When the princess ran away from the castle, she took with her some of the treasure she’d found in the depths of the vaults. After all, her kingdom was in desperate need, and the dragon had lesser need than that of her people. She felt some guilt at the crime, but when she saw the good the money did, she felt a little better, although she always feared the dragon would one day exact his revenge on her for the theft.

In truth, the loss of the treasure meant little to the dragon, as the princess had stolen something far more precious along with her horde, something that could not be so easily returned. Resolved to his fate, the dragon retreated into the depths of the castle and waited, hoping for the day when things would return to the times of happiness he had once known.

(It’s not a happy ending, but life doesn’t work like that.)

 

 

 

 

His life continues in the same quiet rhythm until one day his mother arrives.

It’s been seven years, eight months and twenty one days.

He doesn’t see much of his family any more - his parents live a lot further north, in what Cal likes to refer to as the ass end of nowhere, and really, the distance doesn’t kill him. He’s never had the most harmonious relationship with his parents, but his mother taught him a lot. Which is precisely why when she walks into his house, with the photos all over the walls, the chicken coop outside and the flower garden out the window, she takes a few seconds to eye him critically before asking if he ignored everything she ever said or just the important things.

“How long?” she asks in a tone that allows no escape. He sighs and takes the tea placed in front of him.

“Nearly eight years.”

He doesn’t even need to clarify the question. She knows. Of course she knows. She’s his mother, of course she’s aware of what it’s like, about how there’s a dull ache that haunts him for every moment of every day, about how he can’t escape the memories of her. Nearly eight years and he still dreams of Sarah Manning at least once a week. Nearly eight years and his subconcious still longs to know how it would feel to be tangled up with her in every way possible. He can’t forget her, no matter how he tries. He’d tried dating other women, but after the fifth date in as many weeks, he realised he was just making it a contest. This one had her eyes, that one her hair, the other her smile, her laugh, her ferocity, her tenacity. But none of them were her, and it wasn’t fair to anyone.

So he gave up and took some more photos.

“And you haven’t gone to find her yet?” his mother demanded. Cal bit back a sigh of a long suffering son and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Mom, you can’t just go drag someone back because-”

“Because you love her? Why not?” His mother had always been old fashioned. In the old days, they would have just taken what they loved until it loved them back. In the old days. But this wasn’t the dark ages, and Cal wasn’t that sort of a person. But then, he’d never forgiven his mother for being such a stickler for tradition. Mostly because certain names made your life a living hell and he had one of them.

“She left! She’s probably got a life by now, kid, husband, whatever. It never meant anything to her. Besides, we were young and-”

“And age has nothing to do with it and you know it.”

He does. He doesn’t care.

“I’m not going to do anything, Mom, I’m fine.”

“Then I hope you’re happy being miserable for the rest of your life.”

He is. Because Sarah left him, so wherever she is, she sure as hell doesn’t want to be near him. After all, it’s not like he’s gone anywhere. Not like she couldn’t find him if she wanted to. She’d come back, if she really wanted to. If she really cared.

She doesn’t, though. She never did. It was only ever the money. He’d accepted that a long time ago.

The fact that he still can’t give up on her eight years later just says how utterly pathetic he really is. Or maybe he can just blame it on the species and leave it at that.

Either way, it sucks.

 

 

 

 

Not so long after his mother’s visit, he has what feels like a nightmare. It’s worse than a nightmare, really, and he can’t even really explain what it is or where it comes from, nor can he remember any of the details at all. All he knows is one thing, seared into his brain.

Sarah was in trouble.

But she could be anywhere, and he’s probably just crazy anyway. It’s not like they ever had anything other than his delusions. So he’s still in too deep. So what?

He takes a strong cup of coffee and stays up for a bit, playing guitar until it all dies down.

When he goes back to bed at 4am, he dreams of her.

 

 

 

 

It’s been over nine years.

Whilst Cal loves the cabin, loves what he has, sometimes he just needs to get away for a bit, to give in to what he is underneath what people take him for. Only it’s not giving in. There’s no battle, no war raging inside. He’s always been at peace with who he is. And at the end of the day, it’s who he is that’s gotten him into this mess. If he’d been normal, he could have let Sarah Manning go nine years ago. If he’d been normal, his dreams wouldn’t be plagued by her, he wouldn’t have to spend every moment of his life actively trying to forget her. His life now is not all her fault. Work, society, everything drove him out here, drove him to the arms of the little cabin that had been waiting for him for so long. But he likes it here. He likes the isolation, the freedom.

He likes that he can wander off into the woods for a day and no one questions it.

He likes being able to simply spread his wings and fly.

But when he gets back home, well, he knows something’s off from the first second he reaches the cabin. He goes in thinking it’s burglars, wondering who in the hell would be arduous enough to come all the way out here for his TV (and it’s not even much of a TV). But of course, it’s nothing that simple. Of course it’s not.

Nine years later, and Sarah Manning comes home.

Nine years later, and she brings an eight year old child with her that has his curls and her smile and calls him Daddy.

Not exactly what he’d been imagining all these years.

 

 

 

 

The princess makes it back to the castle, but things aren’t quite like the fairytale said.

It’s hard to believe even for him, that this is reality. That there’s a daughter he never knew, that Sarah would come to him now, after all this time, that he could have missed so much in her life. He wants to beg her for the truth and share his own secrets, to tell her everything. He wants her to stay, more than anything, and that fact cripples him most of all. Even after all this time, after being conned once already, he’d still do anything to have her stay, to have the chance to know his daughter.

The fact he even has a daughter is something it takes a while to get his head around. He questions if she’s really his. He knows, though. He can feel it.

When he tucks her into bed one night, she asks him for a story. So he tells her about the princess and the dragon, tells her how the princess got a little lost, but she came back anyway. He tells her how it makes the dragon so happy, to not be so lonely anymore.

“Did they live happily ever after?” she asks, with a childlike innocence Cal wished he could remember having.

Cal smiles softly, leaning in to kiss her softly as he gets up.

“We’ll see,” he murmurs in reply.

After all, the story was never just a story.

Not when the name Sarah meant princess.


End file.
